VMware today announced that vCloud Hybrid Service, its first public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, will become generally available in September. That's no surprise, as we already knew it was slated to go live this quarter.

What is surprising is just how extensive the cloud will be. When first announced, vCloud Hybrid Service was described as infrastructure-as-a-service that integrates directly with VMware environments. Customers running lots of applications in-house on VMware infrastructure can use the cloud to expand their capacity without buying new hardware and manage both their on-premises and off-premises deployments as one.

That's still the core of vCloud Hybrid Service—but in addition to the more traditional infrastructure-as-a-service, VMware will also have a desktops-as-a-service offering, letting businesses deploy virtual desktops to employees without needing any new hardware in their own data centers. There will also be disaster recovery-as-a-service, letting customers automatically replicate applications and data to vCloud Hybrid Service instead of their own data centers. Finally, support for the open source distribution of Cloud Foundry and Pivotal's deployment of Cloud Foundry will let customers run a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in vCloud Hybrid Service. Unlike IaaS, PaaS tends to be optimized for building and hosting applications without having to manage operating systems and virtual computing infrastructure.

While the core IaaS service and connections to on-premises deployments will be generally available in September, the other services aren't quite ready. Both disaster recovery and desktops-as-a-service will enter beta in the fourth quarter of this year. Support for Cloud Foundry will also be available in the fourth quarter. Pricing information for vCloud Hybrid Service is available on VMware's site. More details on how it works are available in our previous coverage.

Competitive against multiple clouds

All of this gives VMware a compelling alternative to Amazon and Microsoft. Amazon is still the clear leader in infrastructure-as-a-service and likely will be for the foreseeable future. However, VMware's IaaS will be useful to customers who rely heavily on VMware internally and want a consistent management environment on-premises and in the cloud.

VMware and Microsoft have similar approaches, offering a virtualization platform as well as a public cloud (Windows Azure in Microsoft's case) that integrates with customers' on-premises deployments. By wrapping Cloud Foundry into vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware combines IaaS and PaaS into a single cloud service just as Microsoft does.

VMware is going beyond Microsoft by also offering desktops-as-a-service. We don't have a ton of detail here, but it will be an extension of VMware's pre-existing virtual desktop products that let customers host desktop images in their data centers and give employees remote access to them. With "VMware Horizon View Desktop-as-a-Service," customers will be able to deploy virtual desktop infrastructure either in-house or on the VMware cloud and manage it all together. VMware's hybrid cloud head honcho, Bill Fathers, said much of the work of adding and configuring new users will be taken care of automatically.

The disaster recovery-as-a-service builds on VMware's Site Recovery Manager, letting customers see the public cloud as a recovery destination along with their own data centers.

"The disaster recovery use case is something we want to really dominate as a market opportunity," Fathers said in a press conference today. At first, it will focus on using "existing replication capabilities to replicate into the vCloud Hybrid Service. Going forward, VMware will try to provide increasing levels of automation and more flexibility in configuring different disaster recovery destinations," he said.

vCloud Hybrid Service will be hosted in VMware data centers in Las Vegas, NV, Sterling, VA, Santa Clara, CA, and Dallas, TX, as well as data centers operated by Savvis in New York and Chicago. Non-US data centers are expected to join the fun next year.

When asked if VMware will support movement of applications between vCloud Hybrid Service and other clouds, like Amazon's, Fathers said the core focus is ensuring compatibility between customers' existing VMware deployments and the VMware cloud. However, he said VMware is working with partners who "specialize in that level of abstraction" to allow portability of applications from VMware's cloud to others and vice versa. Naturally, VMware would really prefer it if you just use VMware software and nothing else.